“The whole point is we are saving the resources for the world,” said Gayle Volk, a scientist at the Fort Collins seed vault for the past 19 years.

The Fort Collins seed vault was built by the federal government in 1953 – decades before the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008 on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The Choice City was chosen because of the dry climate and adjacent university.

The building, 1111 S. Mason St., has thick cement walls and is specifically designed to withstand natural disasters like tornadoes or severe flooding if Horsetooth Reservoir were to break.

Backup generators are installed to guarantee complete climate control. An actual vault locks in the country’s largest seed collection every night, and only a handful of the site’s 40 employees know the combination.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Mari Tefre/Global Crop Diversity Trust.

“This building has the ability to handle catastrophes, and that’s really important,” said Harvey Blackburn, a scientist at the Fort Collins facility for the past 19 years.

The seeds and animal matter are preserved either in cooler rooms set to minus-18 degrees Celsius or submerged in liquid nitrogen inside of stainless steel tanks. Some plants, like apples, have their twigs saved because those trees grow from grafting and not directly from seeds. Small portions of roots are saved from some plants, like strawberries.

Staff are continually testing the stored seed and plant matter to make sure they are still alive.

“As you go from one species of a plant to another, it requires a different set of technique,” Blackburn said. “And we are constantly refining our technique here.”

Some seeds in the collection are nearly a century old – 90-year-old cotton seeds from the facility were recently grown as part of a research project.

A famous 1940s experiment started in California is now housed at the facility. Researchers then believed they could preserve a batch of seeds until 2307. Test tubes containing those seeds are tested regularly and many have survived.

All new seed patents in the U.S. – like the GMO varieties made by Monsanto – are also required to be stored in the vault.

“We work for scientists of the future but also with scientists of the past,” said research leader Christina Walters, who has worked at the Fort Collins vault for three decades.About 700 people come tour the Fort Collins vault every year. Many of the visitors are from other countries. A group earlier this month featured people representing 24 different countries.To read the full story, go to www.coloradoan.com.